


No Handles Barred

by nimblermortal



Category: Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Genre: Gen, Mentorship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-02 15:58:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17267078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: Mel has this quiet strength that comes from having nothing to prove. But he hasn't always, and as a teenager he made Sunshine's grandmotherso tired.





	No Handles Barred

**Author's Note:**

> Title corrupted from the Flobots' "Handlebars".
> 
> Story is my Yuletide present for myself.

The first time the kid showed up on Diane’s doorstep, he was shaking and hadn’t eaten in three days and was propping up a bicycle that, judging by the plastic flowers woven into the basket, did not belong to him. And in that basket were the encryption codes for vampire networks and a map of over a dozen lairs.

“I’m looking for Mr. Blaise,” he said, and Diane, amused, introduced him to her son. So Onyx was the one who found out about the encryption codes, and the map, and the list of dead friends. Onyx sent the boy out to the kitchen to be fed and found Diane to tell her what he’d learned.

“He crossed the country on his own on that bike,” he said, and shook his head. “That’s a kid who would rip out his own heart and lay it dripping on the table, just to prove a point.”

“Puberty sure hit that one in the gut,” Diane agreed.

“Mother,” said Onyx, his voice pained, and Diane realized his drawl had been tinged with admiration.

“It’s the same teenage bravado all boys get,” Diane said. “This one just happened to have the mettle to back it up. If you could look under his bed, you’d find the same Gear Metal Solid comics that were under yours at that age.”

If he was going to look pained, it may as well be with embarrassment. Diane thought he could use some healthy embarrassment; anyone who hung around in cloaks and carried crystal goblets needed a sharp dose of self-awareness administered regularly, and as a Blaise she counted herself among the number in need of that medicine.

He hadn’t learned yet, though, so he tried to sweep out of the room.

“And Onyx,” Diane said, calling him back. He paused, his back still to her. “Tag the boy. If you don’t, I will. This is going to get worse before it gets better.”

If it gets better, she didn’t say. With any luck he was wise enough to know that by now.

 

The kid left the Blaise household the next day, with a bag full of sandwiches in his floral bike basket. He claimed the bike belonged to him. By that point, Diane was starting to think his shaky thinness was not just the two thousand mile bike ride.

“Don’t be a stranger,” she told him, still playing the kindly grandmother he expected her to be, still letting him think Onyx was the head of the Blaises. “And don’t tell anyone your name.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and pedaled away without looking back.

Two thousand miles, Diane thought, watching him leave, with a basket full of enemy secrets, sleeping alone in the dark.

She should have done more for him. But she already knew she was going to have a lot of regrets in that department.

“Boy,” she called after him. She had to call three more times before he stopped. “Let me give you something before you go.”

From this distance, she couldn’t see the puzzlement on his face, but she could see it in the way he stood half on, half off his bicycle. One hand reached out toward the sandwiches.

“You’re fourteen years old and you drove two thousand miles out to see me,” Diane muttered. “You deserve more than a bag of sandwiches to see you off.”

As if it were a spell, he came back. Slowly, guardedly, as if a gift were suspect. Diane took him down to her crafts room and let him look around while she paged through the wards book she hadn’t opened in years.

“What’s that?” he asked. Diane pulled the book close to her, full of Blaise guardedness against outsiders; and then she let it drop again. Flipped back to the beginning and showed him the basic outlines, how to tell what was a ward and what was nonsense.

“Anyone offers you a ward, you have them draw it first,” she said. “If they can’t lay it down with deft strokes, you get out of there as fast as you can manage.”

“You offering me a ward?” he asked. Diane showed him the page she had her thumb stuck in. He ran a finger over the curving lines, not meeting her eyes for a long moment. And then he looked up. “You going to draw it for me?”

So Diane got out her sketchbook and laid it down. Her fingers didn’t hesitate. She made eight mistakes, not that he noticed. She wouldn’t make them in the final product. He looked down at it, ran a finger over those same lines, and then looked up at her and nodded once.

Diane had him turn on his left side, and started in on his right shoulder. She drew that tree right. She tried to draw it so it would grow and stretch as he did, not spread paper-thin if he decided to get some muscles in his arms, not fall apart if he shrank back down again afterward. Teenagers. What a pain - never knew what size they’d be in three months.

It took four hours to finish the tattoo. He didn’t say a word for the whole process.

And when he pedaled away again, shirt drawn down over that raised red space, he didn’t look back.

 

The second time that boy showed up on a Blaise doorstep, Diane would not have recognized him if it weren’t for that tree tattoo on his right shoulder. He had a leather jacket tossed over his back so anyone could see the wards flowing one into another up his arms, into the ragged cut-off sleeves of some band T-shirt, and his eyes even looking at an old woman were begging her for a fight; but Diane had eyes only for her handiwork.

He had more meat on his bones, and more muscle. The densely packed leaves she had labored over had spread out, and the sun-darkened tinge of his skin gave them a yellow cast like late summer. It looked good, strong; he looked good. No longer a starving, terrified boy, but those eyes - oh, the energy of youth was eating him as fast as puberty ever had. Diane did not miss that drive at all.

“Come in,” she said. “Sit a spell,” and he did, clearly not recognizing her at all. Well, that was the prerogative of youth, and she was sure he remembered the name of every black-eyed boy he met in an alley to defend who-knew-what honor.

She fed him tea and cake, and watched him boil patiently, waiting for a Blaise who could receive the messages he had. She read the wards on his arms - good workings, solid, some a little silly, but none badly made. One had to forgive youths their silliness, their intensity, their boundless energy that was, after all, what kept this war alive. What they fought it to preserve.

“Are you almost done fighting?” she asked him in the middle of another conversation.

“Ma’am, I’ll keep fighting until this war is over,” he said, his tone not changing.

“And after that?” she asked, and Onyx walked in, which was just as well because she didn’t want an answer. Not now. Not for a few years yet.

Onyx let the boy out after their discussion and came back to Diane looking impressed. “That kid brought us intel on the whole Southwest,” he said, “and the Goblet of Ruhr-Thiessin.”

“That boy makes me tired just looking at him,” said Diane, and motioned Onyx over to talk strategy. They were losing; they always had been. But a couple more boys like that and they might lose a lot slower.

 

She didn’t expect to outlive the war. An old woman like her, full of creaks and pains - what purpose would she serve surviving anyway? With a bit of luck, she might win herself a quiet, undisturbed grave.

She’d have her regrets, of course - two of them lived in New Arcadia - but there was no point hoping for better. She made it farther than she thought she would. She lived long enough to see someone else’s grandchild grow up.

He showed up at her door looking like a young father - battered and exhausted, a dim light flickering somewhere deep in his eyes. His leather jacket was in tatters. He was bleeding, and she doubted it was only on his cheek. When he showed up, her only thought at first was weary: Which of my friends is dead now?

“I came to apologize,” he said. “I can’t stay long.”

Behind him, his motorbike was in perfect repair, umpty-bajillion horsepower and a pattern of pansies across its body.

“I’m on my way - well,” he said, old enough to not say where. “We might win this thing, you know?”

_We won’t win_ , she thought. _All we’re doing is buying other boys some time, with coins forged from your life._

“And I thought, the woman who opens the Blaise’s door, every door, no matter which house I stop at - she can’t be just some washerwoman or grandma, you know? She’s gotta be someone special. So I rode by, and I hoped. I wanted to tell her - tell you - I’ve been learning to paint. I’ve been learning to cook. I don’t know what I’ll do after the war, if we win it. But I’m done fighting.

“I think I might rest, a while. If I can find a place to.”

“Go home, boy,” said Diane. “I haven’t got any cookies left.”

She closed the door on him. In the back of her head, Onyx’s voice murmured, _He picked a fight with the world and the world lost._ Diane shut a door on it, too, the well-oiled door that closed off grief.

_That boy will be all right,_ she thought. _But me? My life?_

_Let it be the coin to buy his._

She wished she could have some of his old drive, some of hers. Just for the few things left to be done. But both of them had stopped fighting.

When she opened the door again, he was gone; but the smell of gasoline and fried onions hovered about her porch.


End file.
